Realism, Paralysis, and the Human Condition in Joyce's Dubliners and Ulysses, Sintesi del corso di Inglese

Scarica Realism, Paralysis, and the Human Condition in Joyce's Dubliners and Ulysses e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JOYCE Was born in Dublin in 1882. He studied Italian, French and English at University college in Dublin, where he also started writing literary reviews and articles. In 1902 he received a Bachelor degree with a focus on modern languages and in 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, who became his wife, with whom had two children The director of Berlitz Institute of Trieste offered him a teaching position so he moved to the Adriatic seaport city, here he worked to his best-known literary works: “Dubliners”, a collection of short stories written using a naturalistic style and “A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” a sort of semi-autobiographical Bildunsgroman (“novel of formation” which shows the growing up of a character, another example is Jane Eyre of Charlotte Bronte). The protagonist of the book is Stephen Dedalus, a young artist who rebels against his country, his family and religion and leaves Ireland in a sort of self-imposed exile to find freedom. In Trieste Joyce became friends with the Italian writer Italo Svevo who influenced his style and themes. When in 1914 1WW broke out Joyce moved to Zurich, where he met Ezra Pound and started working on his masterpiece “Ulysses”. Ulysses reproduce the structure of Homer’s Odyssey with its 18 chapter but was a sort of contemporary epic narration. The narration follows the actions of one single character, Leopold Bloom (the modern Ulysses) who wanders through the city of Dublin in one single day (16 June 1904). Through the use of the stream of consciousness technique Joyce enters Bloom’s mind and allows the reader to follow his fragmented thoughts, sensations and perceptions. In 1920 Joyce moved to Paris and worked on his last novel “Finnegans Wake” an all-night dream sequence. After the German invasion on France came back with his family to Zurich in 1940, and died there in 1941. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of Modernism  for the importance given to the inner world of the characters, for the subjective perception of time, for his task concentrated on render life objectively all connected to an isolation and detachment of the artist from society. In his life he showed interest for a broader European culture and this led him to begin to thinks himself as a European rather than an Irishman. IRISH QUESTION Talking about Joyce we can’t ignore his Irish origin even if he was in exile most of his life and wrote most of his works out Ireland. In his works he only described and talked about Dublin, he marked the Irishness of his mind; this is why we can’t understand his works and collection without considering this city and country. He in fact focused on Irish people and places. He detailed portrayed Dublin with vivid realism and attention (different from the naturalism of the 19th century) and took this city as a symbol of alienation that people felt. He both loved and hated this city and the exile gave him the possibility to represent Ireland with a certain objective distance. It was a country of stagnation and stasis, but also his main source of inspiration. Really patriotic, he described the darkest side of the city, was the “jaiz” voice of Irish rebellion and was often criticized for this at the beginning of the 20th century. Dublin is not simply a place, it’s a place of mind and souls, describes the centre of the paralysis and that’s why he choose it. The causes of the paralyses can be both personal and social and means feeling inadequate to the contest you live and the impossibility to reach goals, to reach a universal dimension. Characters are all paralysed, not only physically but also socially, emotionally, psychologically (it’s like death). They represent mankind which is totally stuck in this paralysis (connected to the sterility Eliot talks about, the protagonists all live in the same situationhollow men). They try to fulfil their lives by overcoming all the obstacles but lately surrender because they do not have the will to transform their desire into action. This universal condition of inaction is in what consist this paralysis. This paralysis reveals that the alienation of the characters is so deep that they can only learn to live with it, there is no way out, if they find it it’s just an imagination. It’s all about reaching awareness of this condition, the condition of paralysis and living consciously. On the other side there is also an epiphany, this word means revelation: is the essence of life and a moment that gives values to human experiences. Reaching this epiphany is a goal, opens a new door. And this for Joyce is the only real success people can achieve, is the only one potential way to escape: becoming more aware of how dead and paralysed they are. There are always two level to understand characters’ storiesuniversal and individual, cause a single person reveal a bigger problem, question. People can be extremely particular and at the same time extremely universal. All the facts in his narratives indeed (infatti) are presented through different points of view simultaneously. Joyce is associated to a great change, in fact was the most experimental writer of this age who tried to reach the impersonality for the artist that Eliot stated and defined. He tended to be apart every kind of emotion and reveal the essence of its characters. This means that he was inside them, through this explain us what they felt and thought, the reason of their behaviour. The story takes place some time between New Year’s day and the 6 of January (Epiphany). The setting is a social occasion: a party of the aunts of the central character, Gabriel Conroy. After the description of the preparations Gabriel arrives with his wife, Gretta. After a comment about how long it takes his wife to get dressed he tries to compliment Lily, a servant at the house, but this backfires because of his social awkwardness. (gli si ritorce contro per la sua goffagine sociale). Conroy is the centrepiece of the social occasion cause he’s his aunts’ favourite nephew, to whom they entrust the duty (affidano il compito), but also the honour, of carving the goose at the dinner (scalpire l’oca a cena), and delivering the after-dinner speech (by which we understand Conroy’s mild intellectual snobbery (lieve snobbismo intellettuale) and social awkwardness (imbarazzo sociale)) Quite at the end of the party one of the guests sings a melancholy love song “The Lass of Aughrim”, which prompts Gretta to recall the man she loved before she married Gabriel. She has an epiphany which signals a change of tone in the last few pages of the Dead. Gabriel and Gretta leave the party and go to the hotel where they stayed. Gabriel becomes aware that he desires his wife, but she is too busy remembering the young man, Michael Furey, whom she loved back in Galway before marrying her husband. When they arrived at their hotel room, Gabriel realises that his wife is remembering the tragic death of Michael Furey while he was making the journey to visit Gretta. He realises that she will always love Furey, and that Furey loved her in a way that he cannot compete with. He is humbled (umiliato) by this realisation, which correspond to his own epiphany: an awareness that takes him outside of his own thoughts and self-absorption and makes him view his wife, and by extension, all of humanity in a new way. The imagery: a series of symbolic antithesis: Living-dead; warmth-cold; light-darkness; present-past Symbols: • the snow = a change in Gabriel, a desire to change; • the falling snow = heaven or death reached by people at the end of their life; • Gabriel’s journey to the west = better to pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither with age. The protagonists: Gabriel Conroy, an embodiment of Joyce himself, and Gretta, his wife.  Gabriel’s marriage is clearly suffering from paralysis. Epiphany: the song The Lass of Aughrim, reminds Gretta of a young man, Michael Furey, who died for her when he was seventeen years old.  Gabriel understands he is deader (più morto) than Michael Furey in Gretta’s mind. Testo, SHE WAS FAST ASLEEP (conclusion di The Death) When back at the hotel Gretta was fast asleep and Gabriel looked at her realising that they had never really lived as wife and husband. He thought about how beautiful could she have been when a teenager and understand that now her beauty has obviously change. He has never seen her as Michael Furey. He was now in a full immersion of feelings, was it caused by the dinner, by his speech, by the wine and the dance..? Would his aunt make his same end? He is now realising that he really loves Gretta and started crying. Looking out of the window he understands it was starting to snow and decide to take a trip to the west. “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon the living and the dead.” (La sua anima si abbandonò lentamente mentre udiva la neve cadere lieve nell’universo e lieve cadere, come la discesa della loro ultima fine, su tutti i vivi e i morti.) INTRODUCTION TO ULYSSES Ulysses is Joyce most complex work. It is considered the highest example of modernist prose in the same way The Waste Land was considered the highest example of modernist work. Modernism is the movement that involves all kind of art concerning the spirit of experimentation, the need to recreate something for an age that had been destroyed by the IWW, where there were no more values, and where a revolution was needed. In this context the 2 most outstanding personality, Joyce and Eliot, gave voice to this need for change, this research of new expression. They adapted changes to their writing and create something different in the past. Eliot to be extremely modernist, gave a better definition to what is meant to be tradition. He proved that the past is in the bones of the present. The historical sense that he mention (wider definition of a set of beliefs, idea, cultural references) creates the base for modernism. When we talk about experimenting something we refer to something new. We can’t ignore and erase our past and history, can’t forget our roots, but we have to start from them in order to create a new world. The innovation of Eliot is the revision of the category of the past, tradition is not antiquity but in that lied the possibility for individual talent to emerge, to show skills and capability, in terms of literary expression and interpretation of reality. The myth provided support, solution, this is why the classical artist overused myth , even excessively relying on it. It is comprehensive in that age. If we want to find reasonable answers to our eternal conflict, we have to refer to what connects mankind in the different generation and we have to think that we need to give order. This is what Joyce made while writing Ulysses. 1922 is the year of publication of the Waste Land of Eliot and of the Ulysses of Joyce. They knew each other and supported, but even though there are some linkers between them, such as Ezra Pound, they had really different lives. What connects them is the same need and struggle for going beyond the reality they live, find connection with past in order to give solutions and explain. People couldn’t ignore what were their conditions, and the great problem of modern mankind was represented by the difficulty of communication, that is something we can do when we a have a common background. And this common background is the historical sense, the sense of history and of our past: this is what can make modern mankind to communicate. It is something apart from the superficial moments of the present. The need to communicate and recognise our brothers, the need to share a common destiny, these are all the same for people, just the story has changed. This is what both looks for. - On one side Eliot chooses to describe a waste land, a land that doesn’t really exist, that is not a particular country but is were mankind lives and is connected to their sterility and its contrast with the fertility of the past - On the other side Joyce chose to write about Dublin, without referring to the city itself but referring to it as a symbol: the centre of the paralysis, that is not limited to the only Dubliners. Joyce in this work leaves a possibility of salvation (something that Eliot hadn’t done). This salvation is present also in Ulysses. Ulysses is the smart hero, that makes up trick to win the war and defeat the enemy; is a model. His journey is the journey of mankind, not simply a movement in place but a search for knowledge, a fight against tentation, is a reaction to the intrigues. What the classical Ulysses has done is very similar to what happen to the modern Ulysses, who is Leopold Bloom. ULYSSES Is a complex novel set in and near Dublin on one single day, 16 June of 1904. Its 18 episodes narrate the actions of three characters. - Part I: The Telemachiad  talk about the young Stephen Dedalus (already presented in his previous novel A portrait of the artist as a young man). He is the protagonist of the first three episodes. - Part II: The Odyssey it focuses on the urban wanderings of Leopold Bloom, a middle-age Jewish advertising salesman. - Part III: The Nostos here Leopold came back home to his loving but unfaithful wife Molly. This section ed with Molly’s monologue, nearly 1600 lines of free- Was born in London in 1882 and was the daughter of an important Victorian man of letters, Sir Leslie Stephen, the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography, and of Julia Prinsep Stephen, a woman who had travelled extensively in her life and had worked as a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters. Being a woman, Virginia, did not have the possibility to go to University; however, her father allowed her to have a personal education within his library, due to this was lucky in respect of other girl. This certainly exalted her spirit of experimentation. She created and lived totally the opposition to the Victorian age and was affected by the lack of morality of her period. She published many books, essays, articles and novels. Her most famous novels are Mrs Dalloway and To the lighthouse, which show the influence that the theories of Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson had on Woolf’s imagination. She also wrote an important collection of lecture “A room of one’s own” were she focused on the feminist interest and ideas that she had developed in her lifetime. She is considered as the female counterpart of Joyce, even if her being modernist is quite different. They had different experiences but had common spirit in that age: they made different choice, had different family situation and the end of their life was different. Unlike Joyce she pushed in different directions: Woolf’s novels are like mental voyages which centre around the contrast between inner life and external reality. The interest and representation of human mind was the same of the other modernist, she saw the human personality as a continuous shift of impressions and emotions: we are surrounded by life and impressed by it. In this conception mind is a flow and it’s impossible to distinguish one moment from the next one, this is what creates the choice of adopting the stream of consciousness technique, that even if more soft than Joyce, concentrated on human mind. She cancel the omniscient narrator, and the point of view pass inside the character’s minds through flashbacks, associations of ideas, momentary impressions presented as a continuous flux. What more differentiate Woolf with Joyce is the substitution of the epiphanies with the moments of being: some rare moments of insight during the character’s daily life when they can see reality behind appearances. Something that seriously marked her childhood was the death of her mother at the age of 49, which caused in Woolf a serious nervous breakdown: this is considered to be the beginning of the psychological instability that would affect her entire life. In 1904, after her father’s death, Woolf moved to Bloomsbury, where she founded the Bloomsbury Group, a group of intellectuals and artists which was an example of avant- garde, vivid intellectual climate that combined experimentations in all art. This group had great influence on English literature and art, and their characteristic were: - The developing of stream of consciousness style, - creating a new form of painting post impressionism, one was Vanessa Bell, Virginia’s sister - they were quite aristocratic and extremely interested in the pacifist movement formed after the 1WW and between the two wars (war were really significant to Virginia, and one of the reasons who led her to suicide) - contempt (disprezzo) for traditional morality and Victorian respectability, a rejection of artistic convention and an attack to the bourgeois sexual codes. They developed a different kind of sexual freedom where also homosexual relation were considered. Every respectability imposed was now abandoned. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, with whom she founded the Hogarth Press, a publishing company whose aim was to publish the works of experimental writers. The marriage was really significant cause her husband always supported her in literature and decided to accept their moving to the countryside abandoning London during the war. In 1941 she committed suicide, drowning herself in a river, and leaving a letter to her husband. MRS DALLOWAY the story takes place on one single day in one single place: the city of London. 5 years after the 1WW A middle-aged woman, Clarissa Dalloway, is busy buying flowers and objects for the party she has organised for the evening. The narration follows her, her thoughts and her actions and tries to capture the incoherent impressions that the modern city of London produces in and on her. She recalls her life before 1WW, before her marriage to Richard Dalloway, and her relationship with Peter Walsh. In the novel, Clarissa’s counterpart (controparte) is represented by a man, Septimus Smith, a veteran of the war, who is married to Lucrezia, an Italian woman. Septimus, too, wanders through London, but his is a voyage towards self-destruction: the novel ends with Septimus’ suicide. The news of his death reaches Clarissa while she is at her party, by the nerve specialist Dr Bradshow. She is deeply shocked and realises that Septimus’ death was essential for her to stay alive. The novel ends with Clarissa’s realising that she felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went on living.’ The novel has the name of its female protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, who has conservative political views and is not particularly open minded. As a woman she is clearly defined by her marital status, as suggested by the title “Mrs” which accompanies her name, and by her conditions of mother. She is a complex and frustrated woman: she lives her being a wife and a mother as a limitation to her freedom, but she is not able to express her feelings spontaneously and self-imposes strong restrictions on her liberty just because she feels weak and imperfect. Clarissa’s mind is constantly pervaded by her past memories, which the reader can follow thanks to the stream of consciousness technique used by Woolf. By entering her mind we can understand her inner thoughts and realise that Clarissa’s self is split between the desire to celebrate life (shown by her love for parties and social life) and an attraction towards death (which characterises her as an ageing woman). Septimus, instead, is a man whose sensitiveness has been ruined by the experience of war. He, too, is characterised by Clarissa’s attraction towards death and considers suicide as a form of liberation from weight of life. They wander through London the same day and share the same fears, preoccupations and morbid attractions. At the end of the day only Clarissa is able to survive and when she understands that Septimus had suicided she understands that death is part of life and decides to live on. Qual’è il messaggio che vuole mandare Virginia scegliendo di far suicidare solo Septimus, uomo, e non anche Clarissa, donna. In Mrs Dalloway Woolf deliberately chooses to focus on one single character on one single day (a Wednesday in June) in one single place (London). By doing so she makes a radical shift from the tradition on Victorian literature and underlines the idea that even the most ordinary character on the most ordinary day can be the object of a writer’s scrutiny. To a modernist writer as Virginia interests the working of the mind and the ways in which it is affected by external reality, more than the plot itself. While in Victorian’s novels all the actions are logically and rationally connected with one another, in Mrs Dalloway actions are fragmented and disconnected: what gives unity to the novel is the coherence of the mind, which receives a certain quantity of impressions (not the logical chain (catena) of actions) Also the narrative technique is experimental, similar to Joyce it is used the streams of consciousness technique, even if used in an unusual and poetic way. By the use of this technique she depicts the effects of the modern world on the life of the individuals. But differently to Joyce, who writes uncontrolled and incoherent thoughts, Virginia Woolf presents the character’s thoughts in a controlled and organised way, in fact she uses a third person, impersonal and omniscient narrator. Her style is always elegant and logically structured. Even the way she treats time is unconventional, she focus on subjective time in contrast with objective time, which both together correspond to the actual (effettiva) duration of chronological time. Mrs Dalloway is obsessed with time references to the chiming of clocks (rintocchi) and the passing of the time. Time is symbolically represented by Big Ben, whose chiming is heard by all the characters and represents a unifying element among them.